I have an employee that is absolutely dedicated to everything we do. She has dedicated her whole life to the business. When things don’t go well financially she offers to work for free.
Problem is that she sucks. I don’t know what to call it but it’s kind of like the opposite of the Midas touch, everything she touches turns to shit.
We are afraid to even give her the most simple of projects because she will find a way to create a disaster. She has zero self-awareness and thinks that she walks on water. She’s always trying to get involved in other people’s projects and that is a guaranteed way to either bring it to a grinding halt or bring it crashing down.
After saying it out loud the obvious answer is to fire her. But it is hard. She has been ingrained in everything we do since day one. She knows all of our secrets and all of our weaknesses. I’d rather not burn any bridges.
Would be nice just to find a way to tell her nicely that she sucks and we would like her to stay in her lane and only do the basic projects we assign.
Do you have a performance review process? Run weekly/monthly 1 on 1 meetings with her and treat it as a coaching session. You already know areas where she needs to improve, so your goals are pretty easy to identify. The key to these is communicating and showing that you expect to see self reflection and growth in the role.
The reality is you either made a bad hire, or you’ve done a poor job training/mentoring/managing this person to date. That’s not meant in any mean context, it’s difficult to get right and it varies widely by employee. I’ve had great success with some and really struggled with others.